January 21, 2010

Tough Morning for Justice Stevens

It's rare, and always dramatic to watch, when a Supreme Court justice reads from a dissent on the bench. On Thursday, when Justice John Paul Stevens read at length from his stinging 90-page dissent in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, it was also a little painful to watch.

For more than 20 minutes, Stevens spoke haltingly as he read from a summary of the dissent, a task he'd ordinarily breeze through. The 89-year-old justice seemed off his game, tripping on some words, getting stuck on others. At one point, he kept mispronouncing the word "corporation" as something like "corpo-russian," and he could not quite get it right.

As CBS News Court correspondent Jan Crawford noted on her blog with similar observations, "Maybe it was just a bad day, and Lord knows we’ve all had those." And the written product is more important than how it was read aloud. But with a justice who is said to be on the verge of retiring at the end of this term, and in a case of such high impact, it was hard not to notice Stevens' tough morning.

Comments

So my individual vote and $50 contribution for my candidate is equal to the multiple million dollar contribution of a corporation which has no vote? I fear the checks and balances I learned of in high school civics are now severly crippled if not destroyed. Four allegdly intelligent men and one mute have crippled our fine nation. Can we find a way to recover?

Perhaps he was illustrating the unpalatability of the notion of First Amendment protection for money. Allowing democracy to become the province of the wealthy might cause any one of us to speak haltingly. And as for what will be "painful to watch" just consider the often unsubstantive media buys that the Court's logic invites.